---
layout: post
title: "Heidi's Years of Learning and Travel: Late Pynchon's Academics"
categories: [conferences]
tags: [Pynchon, conference]
published: True
---
The abstract for my paper, to be presented at International Pynchon Week 2015, in Athens on Wednesday 10th June.
Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon's most recent novel, _Bleeding Edge_ [2013], the reader is introduced to the academic research of Heidi, a character who is working on an article for the “Journal of Memespace Cartography” (334-5). Clearly supposed to be humorous, the passage ridicules the academic debates over irony and sincerity that have raged in recent years as a result of David Foster Wallace's well-known essay, “E Unibus Pluram”, a piece that itself targets Pynchon.
Despite its parodic nature, however, this passage is symptomatic of a broader trend in Pynchon's later writing: direct engagement with and representation of academic communities. Indeed, _Bleeding Edge_ parodies Otto Rank and Jacques Lacan throughout (2, 245) and mocks the academic who uses the terms “post-postmodern” and “neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis” (9). Likewise, Pynchon's preceding novel, _Inherent Vice_ [2011], connected the supposedly innocent academics working on the ARPAnet to the sinister histories of the ICBM traced in his earlier work, _Gravity's Rainbow_ [1973].
This paper, moving to focus primarily upon _Bleeding Edge_, will examine the ways in which Pynchon's later novels interpellate their academic readers. Arguing that this is, in some ways, a continuation of a strategy that Pynchon has deployed since his earliest work (as noted by Mark McGurl in his seminal book, _The Program Era_), I will also here work to think more broadly about the wider political connotations of this representation of academia. As with many of the seemingly superficial aspects in Pynchon's novels, I contend that his academics are more politically charged, more over-determined than a surface reading alone might conclude.